Post a response to this discussion thread
Zorro: Even worse, consider what many Americans are calling a political-debate show, "Politically Incorrect," in which a quartet of interchangable ninnies (with an occasional person with a functioning brain but a deficient sense of shame or embarrassment) slang one another in front of a brain-dead studio audience while a mega-ninny eggs them on pretending to be a moderator. Content-free political debate as entertainment. Somewhere James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay are weeping, and Alexis de Tocqueville and Mercy Otis Warren are trying to console them without any luck.
Lisa: I've noticed an odd pattern here in Crankyland, in which many Canadians feel obliged to take the United States to task (usually, I admit, with tongue in cheek) for being a violent land committed to violent revolution. It puzzles me -- almost as much as Noam Chomsky's or Newt Gingrich's stature as a political thinker puzzles me. My colleague John Phillip Reid wrote two books on law on the Overland Trail in large part to disprove an assertion, made with mechanical regularity by Canadian historians, that Canada is uniquely law-abiding whereas the United States is uniquely lawless. It just isn't that simple.
User: I don't know how to respond to your postings, because frankly they are pervaded by precisely the kind of smug, arrogant, know-nothing pseudo-Americanism that has given this country an all-too-deserved reputation for arrogance. Might I remind you that, when the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846, former President John Quincy Adams opposed it and kept on opposing it till the day he died, and new Rep. Abraham Lincoln challenged President James Knox Polk to prove his charge that Mexican forces shed American blood on American soil? I thought that one of the things this country went to war for was individual freedom to oppose wars, especially unjust wars.
I don't devalue the sacrifices made by Vietnam veterans, but I do disagree strongly with the attempt to parlay compassion and sorrow and sympathy for what they went through into an endorsement of the war they fought -- a war that was wrong from the beginning, and a war in which Americans committed war crimes such as those at Sogn My, also known as My Lai. See, e.g., Telford Taylor, NUREMBERG AND VIETNAM: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY; the late Telford Taylor of Columbia Law School was a leading U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg.
Post a response to this discussion thread